Recovering Unsaved Excel Workbooks

mediaphotos/iStock

Mar 15th 2013

173

It's every spreadsheet user's worst nightmare – you've worked on a workbook for a period of time, and then accidentally close it without saving. Or the power goes out, or Excel crashes . . . the list of spreadsheet hazards goes on and on.

If you're using Excel 2010 or later, there's a pretty good chance you can mitigate much – but not all – of the risk related to unsaved workbooks. Regardless, in any version of Excel, you can raise the odds of having a recovered copy of your work available after a software crash. As shown in Figure 1, Excel has long had an AutoRecover feature that's designed to help you recover unsaved workbooks should Excel crash.

Thank You!! I clicked no to save a document that had never been saved before. There wasn't even a starter file to go back to. But I followed your steps to the Manage Version tab right after I closed out and there it was, temporarily waiting for me to save it! Thanks so much.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you'll have to recreate your file again. From what I've observed, unsaved workbooks linger for a couple of days, and then get automatically deleted. I've never stopped to try to figure out exactly how many days a file stays around, but it appears to be 3 or 4.

It's hard to diagnose exactly what happened, but one thing that comes to mind is that you could have added the pictures subsequent to when Excel last created the AutoRecover version. I don't typically incorporate pictures into my spreadsheets, so I can't attest to how well the AutoRecover feature preserves the fidelity of such documents. For what it's worth, It's always worked well for me with my documents.

How about if excel starts "not responding"? All of a sudden, a "buffering" symbol started appearing and it has not gone away. I am not sure how soon you will see this but i am not sure whether to close the document or continue waiting or shut down the computer to later trigger the autorecovery feature.

I'd say at this point you're best off trying to force-close Excel and hope that it brings back an auto-recover version. Be sure to change the setting I mention to every 2 minutes down from the default of 10 minutes to vastly improve the odds of having an autorecover version in the future.

It worked! yes..I shut down the computer and it forceclosed everything. Oddly enough, I was able to open another excel document while that document was still "not responding". But I just did the forceclose and it worked. Thank you!!

Hi worked on a spreadsheet all day yesterday Autosave was on and still I lost all the data. It is saying there are no previous versions available. I work on this type of file everyday and never had problems. Its so urgent can anyone help. I cannot find a temp file either

It's unfortunate that you spent so much time on your document without saving it. A good habit to develop is periodically pressing Ctrl-S in Excel to save your work as you go.

The only other option I can suggest to you at this point is to use Windows Explorer to navigate to the folder where your file resided. Right-click on the file, and see if a Previous Versions command appears. If so, you might get lucky, otherwise you'll have to redo your work, which is a lesson I had to learn myself the hard way multiple times over the years. Good luck!

Hi! i worked on a spreadsheet for two hours yesterday and thought i saved it. Every time i worked on this document it would creat an autosaved copy. i turned off my computer and the restore screen came up on the left but all of the autosavedcopies were there. I thought i chose to save the correct one and deleted the rest, but i picked the wrong one. I found it in my trash can and hit restore, but now i can't find it! any ideas?

If you are using excel 2007 in that case you have to activate Auto Recovery option from Office button -> Excel Options -> Click Save tab -> Active AutoRecover information in every 10 minutes. I hope you like this answer. You can also logon on http://www.eknowledges.com/

I did not save an Excel2010 workbook yesterday. I tried to recover it using the procedure above. When I clicked on 'recover unsaved workbooks' a window asked for the workbook name. A message came up saying it could not be found. What did I do wrong?

I don't think you did anything wrong per se. I haven't experienced the prompt that you encountered, and so unfortunately I can't diagnose what you experienced. It could be that one of the spreadsheets in the AutoRecover folder was corrupted, again it's hard to say without being there.

As I was unable to recover the unsaved version, I have redone the editing that was lost. That took some hours! So now I will be more careful by saving after an edit. Thank you for considering my problem.

I'm sorry to hear that. I've been in your position before. Do be sure to change the AutoRecover setting to every 2 minutes (down from the default of 10) to help raise the odds of having an AutoRecover version in the future.